River Marked (6 page)

I poked him in the side—he could have slipped out of the way, but he didn’t bother.

“Okay,” he said, backing away with exaggerated fear. “I’ll be good, I promise. Just don’t hurt me again.”

He was loud enough that all the people around us looked at us.

Adam pushed his way through the pack and ruffled Ben’s hair as he went by him. “Behave, Ben.”

The Ben I’d first met would have snarled and pulled away from the affectionate scold. This one grinned at me, and said, “Not if I can help it, I won’t,” to Adam.

I liked Ben. But if I catch him alone in a room with Ruthie or Jesse, I will shoot him without hesitation. He’s better than he was when he first came to Adam’s pack, but he’s not safe. Some part of him still hates women, still looks upon us as prey. As long as that is true, he needs watching.

“I have someone I’d like you to meet,” Adam told me, with a nod to Nan.

He took my hand and led me past the giant wedding cake. It was a beautiful thing of blue and white flowers and silver bells—and despite having been cut and served to everyone here, it was still huge. Someone else had ordered it for another wedding and hadn’t paid for it, which was the only way—Jesse had told me—that she’d managed the cake. Whoever had originally ordered it must have been planning a much bigger wedding than this one. I glanced at the crowded basement and tried to imagine a bigger wedding.

“Quick, now,” Adam told me, and tugged me out the side door and up the back stairs. “We’re escaping.”

We made it out to the parking lot without seeing anyone else. Adam’s truck, inexplicably attached to a huge goosenecked travel trailer that looked bigger than the mobile home I’d lived in until this winter, when the fairy queen burned it to the ground, awaited us, poised for a quick getaway.

“What’s the hurry?” I asked, as Adam boosted me in through the driver’s side, got in behind me, and started the truck before he had the door closed.

“Some of the fae have an odd idea of bride send-offs,” he explained, as I wiggled over to the passenger seat and he guided the truck out of the parking lot, “including, according to Zee, kidnapping. We decided not to chance Bran’s feelings should such a thing happen, and Zee promised to run interference for us until we were off.”

“I forgot about that.” And I was appalled because I knew better. “Bran and Samuel are probably more of a danger than any of the fae,” I told him. “Someday, I’ll tell you about some of the more spectacular wedding antics Samuel’s told me about.” Some of them made kidnapping look mild.

I belted in, helped him to put on his own seat belt, and glanced behind us again. “In case you didn’t notice, there’s something very big stuck to the back of your truck.”

He smiled at me, his eyes as clear and happy as I’d ever seen them. “And that’s my surprise. I told you I’d plan the honeymoon.”

I blinked at the trailer. “Bring your own motel room along?” It loomed over us, taller than the truck—which was plenty tall on its own—taller and wider, too, with sections along the sides that were obviously intended to pop out. “I’m pretty sure it’s bigger than my old trailer.”

Adam glanced over his shoulder and huffed a laugh. “I think it might be. This is the first I’ve seen of it. Peter and Honey took the truck and hitched it up.”

“Is it yours?”

“No. I borrowed it.”

“I hope we’re not going anywhere with little windy roads,” I said. “Or small parking lots.”

“I thought we’d spend the night in this really neat truck stop I know of in Boardman, Oregon,” Adam said, guiding it onto Highway 395 southbound. “The smell of diesel and the hum of big engines to accompany our first night together as man and wife.” He laughed at my expression. “Just trust me.”

We did stop in Boardman to change out of our wedding clothes. Inside, the trailer was even more amazing than outside.

Adam unhooked the billion bitty buttons that ran from my hips to my neck. A billion bitty buttons from my elbows to my wrists still awaited. They required two hands to unbutton, so all I could do was look around the trailer with awe. “It’s like a giant bag of holding. Huge on the outside, but even bigger on the inside.”

“Your dress?” he said, sounding intrigued.

I snorted. “Very funny. The trailer. You know about bags of holding, right? The nifty magic items that can hold more things than would ever really fit in bags of their size?”

“Really?”

I sighed. “The
make-believe
magic item from Dungeons and Dragons.” I craned my neck around, and said, “Don’t tell me you haven’t played D and D. Is there some rule that werewolves can’t indulge?”

He leaned his forehead against my shoulder and laughed. “I may have been born in the Dark Ages”—actually he’d been born in the fifties, though he looked like he was only in his midtwenties; being a werewolf halts and reverses the aging process—“but I have played D and D. I can tell you for certain that Darryl has never indulged, though. Paintball is his game.”

I took a minute to picture Darryl playing paintball. “Scary,” I muttered.

“You have no idea.”

Adam rubbed his cheek against mine and went back to his task. “I could just pull this apart, instead of unbuttoning it,” he said ten minutes later. It was a serious offer, spoken in a hopeful-but-doomed voice.

“You do, and you get to sew all the buttons back on,” I told him. “Jesse is planning on reusing this.”

“Soon?” he asked.

“Not that I know of.”

“Somehow,” he grumped, “that’s not as reassuring as it ought to be.”

“Gabriel’s going to college in Seattle in the fall,” I reminded him. “I think you’re safe this year.” My right-hand man had a thing for Adam’s daughter, and right now he was living in the tiny manufactured home that the insurance had replaced my old trailer with. A situation that made them happy and Adam antsy. He liked Gabriel, but Adam was an Alpha werewolf—which put him off-the-scale protective of his daughter.

Eventually, Adam managed the buttons. While I hung the dress up and put it in the closet (yes, there was a closet), Adam stripped off his tux and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. He didn’t often dress down that far. Except for when he was working out, usually slacks and a button-up shirt was as grubby as he got. My clean shirt and jeans were dressed up for me. I was a mechanic by trade, and it was a rare thing when my fingernails were clean. Somehow, we fit together anyway.

He bought us milk shakes and burgers (one for me, four for him) from the nearby restaurant, filled the diesel tanks in his truck, and we were back on the road.

“Are we going to Portland?” I asked. “Or Multnomah Falls?”

He smiled at me. “Go to sleep.”

I waited three seconds. “Are we there yet?”

His smile widened, and the last of the usual tension melted from his face. For a smile like that I’d ... do anything.

“What?” he said.

I leaned over and rested my cheek against his arm. “I love you,” I told him.

“Yes,” he agreed smugly. “You do.”

THE COLUMBIA GORGE IS A CANYON THAT RUNS nearly eighty miles through the Cascade Mountains, with the Columbia River cutting through the bottom. It is part of the border between Washington and Oregon. Most of the travel is on the main, divided highway on the Oregon side, but there is a highway on the Washington side that runs most of the length of the gorge. Though the western part of the gorge is a temperate rain forest, the eastern section is dry steppe country with cheatgrass, sagebrush, and breathtaking basalt cliffs that sometimes form columnar joints.

Adam turned off the highway at Biggs and took the bridge back over the Columbia to the Washington side. That bridge is one of my all-time favorites. The river is wide, a mile or nearly so, and the bridge arches gracefully up and over the water to the town of Maryhill.

It was founded by financier Sam Hill (as in “where in Sam Hill?”) in the early twentieth century. He’d envisioned a Quaker paradisaical farm community and named the town after his wife, Mary Hill. She might have thought it was cooler, I suspect, if it weren’t out in the middle of the desert with about two inches of soil. There isn’t much left of the town—a few small orchards, a couple of nearby vineyards, and a state-run campground—none of which made Maryhill special.

But Sam Hill hadn’t stopped with the town. He built the very first WWI memorial, a full-sized replica of Stonehenge visible from the highway on the Oregon side of the river.

We turned west once we were over the bridge, though, away from Stonehenge and Maryhill. After ten or fifteen minutes of driving down a narrow highway that cut its way along the desert-steppe country of the Columbia Gorge, we came to a campground. Though it was groomed to within an inch of its life, there was no one inside. Adam pulled in the driveway, took a card off the map holder on his sunshade, and swiped it though the control box next to the gate. A green light flashed, and the gate slid open.

“We have it to ourselves,” he said. “I did some of the security here, and they told me we could stay even though it doesn’t officially open until next spring. I’m sure the shower in the trailer works, but the ones in the restrooms over there are a lot bigger.”

I looked around the campground, where tall oaks and maples gave shade to the graveled RV spaces. The big trees weren’t natural for this part of the state, any more than the green, green grass—someone had spent a lot of time tending them.

Adam pulled into a spot halfway between the gray stone restroom and the river. I found myself frowning at one of the trees. It must have been sixty feet tall, its roots buried deep in the earth where it wouldn’t disturb the groomed campground.

“Ten days,” I said.

He knew how my mind worked. “Zee has the shop,” he said. “Darryl and his mate are watching Jesse, who told me before we left that she didn’t need a babysitter.”

“To which you answered that they were bodyguards, not babysitters,” I said. “But she argued that bodyguards usually didn’t get to tell the people they are guarding what time they have to be home.”

“And you weren’t even there for the argument,” marveled Adam. “Darryl broke in, and said, ‘Family does.’ And that was the end of that. So what else are you worried about?”

“Stefan,” I said. “I asked Warren to look in on him, but ...”

“I had a talk with Stefan,” said Adam. “Unlike you, my conscience didn’t prevent me from telling him he needed to fill out his menagerie. One of his problems is that he doesn’t want to hunt in his backyard, and he can’t leave his menagerie alone. Ben offered to watch his people, and Warren should leave for Portland tomorrow with Stefan. Anything else?”

“Ten days,” I said, giving him a broad smile. “Ten days of vacation with you. No interruptions.”

Adam leaned over and kissed me—and that was the last time I worried about anything for some time.

WE SWAM IN THE RIVER—OR RATHER I SWAM AND ADAM waded in chest high because werewolves can’t swim. Their muscle mass is too dense to be buoyant, so they sink to the bottom like anchors.

The campground was built around a fair-sized backwater that was fast enough not to be stagnant but slow enough to be really good swimming. Strategic growths of Russian Olive and a selection of shrub-sized plant life I couldn’t name, as well as a ten- or fifteen-foot drop just before the river, gave the swimming area a feeling of privacy. The temperature had risen to somewhere around a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, so the water felt really good.

We splashed and dunked each other like a pair of kids, and I laughed until I had to go out and sit on the shore to catch my breath.

“Coward,” Adam said from the river, his hands just below the surface where he could gather ammunition to splash me.

“Not a coward,” I vowed, panting as the sun tried to bake the water out of my hair, skin, and swimming suit all at once.

“Then what are you doing up there?” he asked.